Switzer­land-Sin­ga­pore: deepen part­ner­ship and strengthen sus­tain­abil­ity

In order to fully ex­ploit the po­ten­tial of bi­lat­eral re­la­tions with Sin­ga­pore, economiesu­isse yes­ter­day re­ceived a twenty-strong del­e­ga­tion of high-rank­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives of busi­ness and in­dus­try as­so­ci­a­tions from the is­land state. The lat­ter was co-led by Jef­frey Siow, Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of En­ter­prise Sin­ga­pore (ESG) and Lam Yi Young, CEO of the Sin­ga­pore Busi­ness Fed­er­a­tion (SBF).

Com­mon suc­cess fac­tors

Lib­eral mar­ket con­di­tions, strong in­te­gra­tion into global value chains and a pi­o­neer­ing role in in­no­va­tion: Sin­ga­pore and Switzer­land have many suc­cess fac­tors in com­mon. This was aptly stated by economiesu­isse Chair­man Christoph Mäder in his in­tro­duc­tory speech. The Sin­ga­porean del­e­ga­tion was par­tic­u­larly in­ter­ested in the Swiss ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem. For a long time, the South­east Asian city state re­lied on aca­d­e­mic ed­u­ca­tion. In view of the cur­rent skills short­age, how­ever, it is in­creas­ingly push­ing a dual sys­tem where stu­dents are to come to­gether with com­pa­nies. Claude Meier, Di­rec­tor of Hotel­lerieSu­isse, then ex­plained the dual ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem in Switzer­land using the ex­am­ple of the Swiss hos­pi­tal­ity in­dus­try. Just last month, he opened a new cam­pus of the Ecole hôtelière de Lau­sanne (EHL) in Sin­ga­pore.

Ex­ploit­ing syn­er­gies in the field of sus­tain­abil­ity

Spe­cial at­ten­tion was also paid to sus­tain­abil­ity, es­pe­cially since Sin­ga­pore in­tro­duced a na­tional strat­egy for sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment in Feb­ru­ary 2021 called the “Green Plan 2030". In his pre­sen­ta­tion, Felix Wenger, Se­nior Part­ner at McK­in­sey Switzer­land, pointed out the three di­men­sions of sus­tain­abil­ity – eco­nomic, en­vi­ron­men­tal, and so­cial. He also noted that as a global busi­ness and fi­nan­cial cen­tre, Switzer­land has more than 25 times the de­car­bon­i­sa­tion lever­age be­yond do­mes­tic emis­sions. As Sin­ga­pore is in a sim­i­lar po­si­tion in this re­gard, co­op­er­a­tion op­por­tu­ni­ties with the Swiss busi­ness com­mu­nity will be ex­plored even more in the fu­ture.

Long-stand­ing and close bi­lat­eral re­la­tions

As the most im­por­tant trad­ing part­ner in South­east Asia and the fourth largest in Asia (after China, Hong Kong and Japan), Sin­ga­pore is of cen­tral im­por­tance for the Swiss econ­omy. A mile­stone in these close eco­nomic re­la­tions was reached with the Sin­ga­pore/EFTA free trade agree­ment signed in 2003. Since then, not only has bi­lat­eral trade in goods in­creased sharply, but so has Swiss di­rect in­vest­ment. One of the main rea­sons for this is Sin­ga­pore's fi­nan­cial and in­sur­ance sec­tor. In total, around 400 Swiss com­pa­nies are ac­tive in Sin­ga­pore today, em­ploy­ing more than 25,000 peo­ple.